Case Study: BIC Corporation achieves 40% fewer changeovers and 20 extra packaging hours per week with Blue Yonder

Improving Factory Planning at BIC

BIC, a global leader in stationery, lighters and shavers that sells 32 million products daily, faced limits at its Charlotte packaging facility where a manual three-day rolling sequencing process caused frequent, costly changeovers and constrained visibility into production. The short planning horizon and rising capacity pressures risked expensive capital investment in a new plant if throughput couldn’t be increased.

By implementing Blue Yonder’s factory planning, BIC automated scheduling and extended the planning horizon to two weeks—factoring order need dates, tooling and labor—to produce a single, shareable production plan. The change cut changeovers by 40%, eliminated one-to-two weekly changeovers, freed about 20 hours of packaging capacity per week (avoiding new-plant investment), improved customer satisfaction, and provided measurable feedback to optimize production rates and tooling.

BIC Corporation